Customer Reviews

The Underpainter

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As a painter, books about artists naturally appeal to me. But even with such a head start, "The Underpainter" became one of those novels I only finish reading by skipping from section to section, trying to catch sight of those threads of the story which still held my interest. "The Underpainter" is a fictional first-person memoir told in the voice of Austin Fraser, an elderly abstract artist looking back on his life as the 1970s draw to a close. With unusual locales such as Rochester, New York, and a Canadian mining town; with the requisite celebrity cameos, in the form of Robert Henri and Rockwell Kent; and with the potential for romantic conflict, when the same girl catches the eye of both Austin and his summertime friend George, the ingredients for a good story were probably there.

In trying to figure out what went wrong, I'm inclined to cast the blame on the supporting characters. Austin in a different setting might still have come across as cold and uncaring, but his performance might have been more interesting on a different stage. His artistic education was credibly described, and his peculiar relationships with both his mother and his father were well explored. But George Kearns comes across as such an unambitious loser that he becomes unsympathetic, a trend that accentuates steadily right up to the book's conclusion. And we learn far, far more about George's lover Augusta Moffat than we really need to know - page after page describes her childhood before she ever crossed George and Austin's path, yet while her importance to the storyline is high, her actual protagonism is quite brief. On the other hand Sara, Austin's lover of fifteen years - fifteen summers, Austin would hasten to interject - never really comes alive. We never get even the slightest hint of why their relationship lasted so long. Was he just that good looking? Was she so plain no one else was interested in her?

Jane Urquhart writes well, and in her hands Austin sometimes speaks with resonance. Ultimately, though, in my opinion this book was let down by the direction its plot took, spending far too much time on a mediocre parochial supporting cast and not enough showing us Austin's performance in the art world he is supposed to have succeeded in.

Austin, an American painter, looks back at his life, and the people whose lives are intertwined with his memories. George, the serious and thoughtful china-painter, Sara, his quiet summertime model and lover, Augusta, who was a nurse during the war, who tells him her life story in one night while sitting in a china hall.

This contained some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read, and I've taken note of a dozen of the loveliest passages from the book. But as a whole, as a novel, I could barely finish. I had absolutely no sympathy for the protagonist, and the plot was unapparent to me until the last fraction of the book. As beautiful as those passages were, they weren't enough to keep me entertained through the rest of this novel. Writing style deserves 5 stars, characterization 3 stars, and plot and storyline 0.

Don't mistake "The Underpainter" for an airy fairy novel with a soft underbelly for its languid pastel coloured prose belies a diamond hard centre. In this beautifully evocative 1997 winner of the Governor General Book Award, Jane Urquhart pierces the cerebral exterior of successful modernist artist Austin Fraser to reveal a cold callous soul, whose inability to give or receive love leads to unconscious acts of cruelty to those closest to him. Only upon reflection as an old man does he acknowledge his part in their fate but he has only memories to taunt not console him. Sara, his model and lover of many years, proves to be nothing more than a handy object holding a mirror to his own soul. She doesn't really exist for him, hence when they break up, he looks back upon a relationship spanning fifteen summers, not fifteen years. Not surprisingly, the fox in Sara's garden - a metaphor for Sara's inner self - doesn't exist in his mind simply because he has never seen it. When his mentor Rockwell critiques his paintings, it turns out to be an indictment of the painter himself. Austin is furious but finally unable to deny Rockwell's judgement. Vivian, heartless and vain, is Austin's spiritual twin in the novel. They are an anathema to George and Augusta, whose lives are deeply rooted in reality. George is also an artist, but unlike Austin, doesn't despise industry but works in his father's china shop and has survived the war. Augusta is a farm girl, warm, practical and disciplined, and the perfect partner for George until Vivian, with Austin's help, re-enters their lives one evening with devastating result. "The Underpainter" brilliantly exposes the selfishness of art for art's sake. It is a chilling reminder that art unless tempered by humanity ultimately conceals more than it reveals. Jane Urquhart is a tremendous novelist. "The Underpainter" is a gorgeously written and incandescent piece of work that leaves an indelible impression long after it's read.

One way I measure a book is by how much it makes me think - and for how long after I've finished it. I first read this book two years ago, and still it haunts me. The characters are not especially sympathetic - least of all the artist - but what is disturbing is how well they are drawn from real life. The author has as remarkable an eye for character and human nature as a fine painter for his or her subject. I've recommended this book to many, but only to those who can appreciate a story of quiet depth. It's also a story that demands rereading.

I found Jane Urquhart's novel to be quite compelling and well-written. Being an artist myself, I was eager to read a novel whose main character was an artist. The author captured the way in which art (any art) training is abjectly consuming at the expense of individual development. Artists and musicians tend toward the egocentric . . . partly because of the intensity of their training. Austin certainly fell into that category.

I was also pleased that Ms. Urquhart was able to depict with sensitivity the effects of trauma on the human psyche. She was not only sensitive but very graphic if one was able to travel with her during the story's telling. It is rare to find such idiosycratic topics dealt with in the context of a novel much less to find them dealt with really well.

The most compelling thing about the novel, however, is the warmth and compassion that she develops and portrays in her characters. In spite of their very human frailties, they are lovable if not always likeable.

I look forward to reading other Jane Urquhart works!

An artist/musician/reader

an amazing novel. the narrator- Austin Fraser is cruel, vain, afraid, human. this novel depicts his story- the story of a man who was afraid of his own self. the story of the underpainter. the artist who flooded the underpaiting in his art with his own life, his melancholy, his passions, his all, then blurring it out. the plot takes erratic jumps all over a half century, yet most of the story takes place during the '20s and '30s. this book tells the story of Austin's life. it tells how many of the special, tender relationships in his life ended, either gradually, or abruptly. it tells of this man's struggles, his passions, his failures. it tells of how he ran away from happiness in the face of his own fear and vanity. the plot is filled to overflow with his life, and the lives of those who came to know him, those who's lives intertwined with his own, or not at all. those who's lives Austin kept carefully stored away in his photographic memory. all throughout the book he tells of how well he remembers it all, how picturesquely it is all stored in this now old man's mind, so well he could paint it. relationships spanned over decades, people whom he's pushed away, people who died far away, yet right before his eyes. ghosts of the past, his own and others'. this is the story of Austin Fraser.

"The Underpainter" is a very beautifully written book...as it should be as it is about an artist looking bakc on his life and the love he left behind; and should have held on to. It is a book full of beautiful imagery and would appeal to even those who do not now anything about art...the story was very interest keeping and the characters were fleshed out quite nicely. A all round pleasant read.

The strange title of this prizewinning novel is explained gradually over the course of the book. Its protagonist Austin Fraser, a highly successful American artist, has adopted an unusual approach to his mature works. Although he begins each painting in the realistic style of the landscapes and nude studies of his Canadian model Sara Pengelly with which he originally made his name, he now paints over this underpainting with concealing glazes and even white impasto, so that only the faintest outlines of the original remain. Although Urquhart has several real artists appear in the book, among them the great teacher Robert Henri and that Hemingway of the frozen North, Rockwell Kent, she does not identify Austin Fraser with any real-life original, but it is not hard to imagine his new style fitting in with mid-century Abstract Expressionists such as Clyfford Still or the painted-over images of Robert Rauschenberg. Trained as an art historian herself and twice married to artists, Urquhart knows art; the insight into the painter's craft is one of the deep pleasures of her book.

More importantly, though, Fraser's painting style is a metaphor for his emotional detachment. What he would describe in Robert Henri's words as the necessary distance between the painter and his model, is in fact a refusal to allow himself to feel, deliberately removing himself from a situation until there is almost no connection left. Not for nothing are his late paintings known as "the erasure series"; it is himself that he is rubbing out. Nowhere is this more clear than in his relationship with Sara Pengelly, a waitress in a hotel in the Canadian village of Silver Islet, at the tip of the Sleeping Giant peninsula jutting out into Lake Superior. Even though Sara becomes his model, lover, and companion over the course of fifteen summers on the Canadian shore, and he knows every inch of her body, he is more reluctant to penetrate her mind, and deflects all her attempts to reach his own. While we can understand Fraser as an artist, and perhaps (if we are honest) recognize a similar need for self-protection in ourselves, he nonetheless comes over as the least warm of Urquhart's protagonists, though one of the most fascinating.

The novel is contained entirely in memory with no significant action in the present time. This is unusual for Jane Urquhart, although her most recent novel, SANCTUARY LINE, comes close. Memory, however, is one of the persistent themes in Urquhart's work, as are art, imagination and the supernatural, immigration, the Great Lakes landscape, the disappearance of former lifestyles and places, and the effects of war, all of which have a place in this story. As in THE STONE CARVERS, the novel that would follow this, the war in question is World War I, which draws in the two other members (with Austin and Sara) of the quartet around whom the novel revolves. These are George Kearns, a young Canadian china painter, and Augusta Moffatt, a wartime nurse who becomes George's lover. George is the antithesis of Austin as an artist, painting charming miniatures on cups and thimbles; it is only gradually that Austin realizes what his friend has to teach him as a human being, and by then we have already reached the searing climax of the book. Augusta is a less clear figure at first, though she eventually emerges with more clarity than Sara, with features that distinguish many of Urquhart's heroines: strength, sensitivity, a lonely childhood, and the power of second sight. Though pursuing obscure occupations in a Canadian backwater, George and Augusta have been thorough the mill of experience, and thus act as a contrast to Austin who remains on the sidelines throughout.

The sideline aspect is something that may make some readers enjoy THE UNDERPAINTER less than Urquhart's more active novels, such as AWAY, CHANGING HEAVEN, or A MAP OF GLASS. It is an interior book in which very little happens. But Austin Fraser's journey into the frozen depths of his soul will have results: in his final work, the underpainting will remain uncovered.

I love all things Urquhart. she delivers a story filled with flawed and recovering characters. i had a hard time with the term 'underpainting' as i didn't understand it, and as it was an extended metaphor, I feel like I missed something.

But the story line was solid. I had a great sense of place and of character at all times.

reading some of the other reviews was disturbing. so she doesn't follow typical novel plot structure - so what? it's always refreshing when someone steps out of the box most fiction writers have been hiding in. this is a beautifully written and engaging book. i looked forward to reading it every night - and i can't say that about many books.